Technical Abstract:
Rosaceaous species comprise an extremely important group of specialty crops due to their economic, social, and cultural roles, as well as, their impacts on human health. Substantial progress has been made over recent years in understanding the genetic and molecular basis for many agronomic traits, however, progress in directly linking gene function to specific characters has remained slow due in part of a lack of efficient genetic transformation systems. In this book chapter, we describe the history of plum transformation and our recent progress in converting this stone fruit species into a robust and highly efficient model system for Rosaceae functional genomics.